Technical Field
The present invention relates to provenance tracking of software authorship rights and more particularly to a system and method for monitoring rights to ensure compensation for original and derivative software bundles.
Description of the Related Art
Recently centralized marketplaces for software applications, such as mobile application stores (e.g., Nokia® Ovi Store, Apple® App Store, Amazon® EC2 DevPay AMIs) where developers upload their applications, have become very popular, and for a small fee, users are allowed to download applications. These stores have been profitable to both developers and store providers (Nokia®, Apple®, etc.). One of the reasons why these stores are successful is the loyalty of their users, e.g., for an iPhone® user, the Apple® App Store is the only authoritative place to download iPhone® applications and so forth.
However, as virtualized application images become more popular, these stores may wish to incentivize and encourage derivative work to offer better application images with the appropriate permissions. In this model, a developer will checkout a virtual image, possibly created by other developers, enhance the image by adding more applications, change configurations, etc. and check-in the modified image for sale as a new application image.
The current state of the art does not provide solutions for provenance tracking and does not encourage image sharing in a way that will lead to others modifying an image and putting the repackaged image for sale. Some companies provide a market place for shared VM images. These work as follows: a developer after creating a new VM or rebundling an existing one, makes it available for other users as a paid VM. A paid VM has a product code that belongs to the original developer, and stays with the VM even if it is rebundled. Unfortunately, anyone with a privileged access to the VM (root access) can change or remove the product code of the original VM or the rebundled one.